An invite came across my desk this week to a St Andrew's Night Celebration, sponsored by Castlereagh Borough Council and the Ulster Scots Agency. Sometimes it seems the closest many people here get to Scotland is tussling with the lid of a Marks & Spencer seasonal shortbread tin embellished yet again with a picture of Eilean Donan Castle. (Honestly! There are other places in Scotland, and some of them even have people). Anyway, the phrase "Ulster Scots" has a peculiar resonance for me. I'm from the south-west of Scotland. Throughout my school years, we had to learn and recite Burns' poetry and songs. I worked in Burns' Cottage for two summers, taking money from harried Americans who had scheduled a full 20 minutes to appreciate the life and times of the ploughman poet, but who generally wanted just to use the rest rooms and buy something tartan before zooming up the coast to reach Stornaway by nightfall. Our Christmas parties and school formals were always ceilidhs, and that meant practising Strip the Willow, the Dashing White Sergeant and the Gay Gordons (sic) for weeks on end. We had a ceilidh at our own wedding, where we birled and reeled the evening away in a hotel that overlooks the Brig o' Doon. A couple of generations back from my dad, his family originally came from the Ards Peninsula but left to find work in the coal fields of south Ayrshire. I've lived in Ulster for eighteen years now, and...well, you get the picture.
I'm not even going to begin here on the hijacking or contrivance made of Ulster Scots that goes on for reasons of political expediency, parity of esteem or desperate claims of identity. But it's helfpul just to observe that the first edition of Burns' poems, the Kilmarnock edition, was printed in Lallans, or Lowland Scots. Ulster-Scots is derived from, and has its closest linguistic parallels with this same tongue. Such was the impact of Burns in Ulster that the first edition of his poetry printed outside Scotland was in Belfast, and the centrality of his position within the Ulster-Scots literary tradition is beyond doubt. But when I read in my invite that the Risin' Stours were playing at the St Andrew's night party I fell about laughing. I think someone needs to go and check a dictionary. I'm happy to be corrected, but guess that whoever named the band thought they were calling themselves the rising stars. If so, surely it should be Risin' Sterns. But "Stours"? Stour (always used in the singular) is what you get when you hit a carpet with a broom, or what you find when you lift the cushion seats off the sofa . (In my house, at least, domestic goddess dna being absent from my own genetic code.) Of course it could be that they are trying to strike a more literary note, or perhaps even wanting a more martial overtone, as stour can mean strife or conflict - but mainly in the Banffshire area. Or perhaps they meant storm or wild weather as Shetlanders and Orcadians would use the word....But in Ulster Scots? I don't think so!
Well, here endeth the lesson. But for an appreciation of Burns and his influence on Ulster Scots, check out this link to hear Seamus Heaney's own warm and wonderful tribute. Enjoy!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7209402.stm
